As the Second Ave. Subway construction has dragged on throughout the past three and a half years, life along the avenue has been something less than pleasant. Construction lights and noise fill the air at all hours of the day, and fenced off sidewalks and roads have become the norm. Under the aegis of lazy landlords, poorly-maintained residential buildings have suffered structural damage while businesses have suffered tremendously.
Time and again, the media coverage has returned to the price businesses have paid as subway construction has enveloped the neighborhood. Early on, merchants along the avenue complained of reduced foot traffic and the inconveniences from and concession to construction had on their bottom lines. For instance, 13 restaurants lost significant revenue when they could not install outdoor cafes over the summer months, and as recently as August, real estate trade The Real Deal noted how business at some stores was down by as much as 40 percent. It’s not a good time to be a store-owner above the future subway route.
In today’s Times, Joseph Berger covers the tried-and-true economic ground along Second Ave. He spoke with over 20 merchants, and they all said the same thing: It’s worse than they expected. By Berger’s count, over 30 businesses have closed since 2007, and those that are still open say construction has led to drop-offs in business by 25-50 percent. “Second Avenue has become a place that shoppers avoid,” Manhattan Chamber of Commerce Chairman Jeffrey Bernstein said. “People don’t want to come. It’s difficult to maneuver.”
Berger’s piece is largely anecdotal, but he hits upon the concerns that neighborhood business owners have. Some of them are more founded than others. For instance, restaurants and other service-based stores that rely on foot traffic have suffered legitimate declines in business during the construction. Some, though, complain that construction has limited the ability of their suburban costumers to drive into the city — and illegally double park — while picking up speciality items such as bratwurst or non-speciality items such as a quick lunch.
Therein lies the rub. The city is building the Second Ave. subway to improve transit access to the eastern parts of the East Side. I find hard to be too sympathetic to those businesses bemoaning a lack of on-street space for customers who owners willing admit double-park while shopping.
Berger too focuses on the he said/she said aspect of the fight between business, the MTA and city and state politicians. Says The Times scribe:
Many say they were misled at meetings about the damage construction would wreak. “I think they painted a picture at these meetings, and then they delivered something else,” said Joe Pecora, an owner of Delizia 92 pizzeria and restaurant at 92nd Street, who formed the Second Avenue Business Association two years ago because of the construction’s impact.
Officials say they have honored commitments they made to minimize disruption and mitigate noise and dust. Lois Tendler, a vice president for government and community relations at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said the agency had met regularly with merchants and had signs on its Web site and at Lexington Avenue subway stations urging people to “Shop Second Avenue.”
Shopkeepers say they need financial help and compensation. But an effort to provide tax relief and grants was vetoed last year by Gov. David A. Paterson. “We have been incredibly responsive to every feasible request,” Ms. Tendler said. “Where we part company with shop owners is that we do not have the ability to pay them for the lost income. We use public money, and we do not know of any government entity that pays for lost business.”
The kicker to Berger’s story reveals another dichotomy along Second Ave. He tells the story of Young Yoo, a then-60-year-old widow who opened up a small restaurant right near the Launch Box at Second Ave. She invested heavily in this space ” a few months before ground was broken for the subway in front of her store” and today is nearly broke. She’s trying to wait out a year before her Social Security benefits kick in, and her son sounds defeated. “Instead of being a prosperous restaurateur, she’ll end up being a penniless person waiting for a check,” Peter Yoo said. “That’s what Second Avenue did to her. It created a pauper.”
I feel for Mrs. Yoo. She wanted to open a business personal to her before retiring, but the subway construction interfered. Yet, at the same time, I have to wonder why Mrs. Yoo chose that spot a few months before ground-breaking. By late 2006, it was clear that the MTA would soon begin work on the Second Ave. subway, but after decades of false starts and canceled projects, business owners and Second Ave. residents refused to believe work would happen. Should the city be forced to foot the bill for these risky decisions? Some might even call it folly.
In six years, business owners will be clamoring for Second Ave. space, and property values will climb precipitously. The construction will fade like a bad dream, and merchants will enjoy renewed prosperity along Second Ave. For now, though, they’ll suffer. Even as the state and city try to help, even as the MTA tries to minimize the disruption, these businesses are paying the costs of progress.
20 comments
The construction delays are killing the businesses. Every delay stretches more merchants past their breaking points. Since the MTA is unable to deliver the project in any timely way and they continue with hollow promises, merchants are being encouraged to do the impossible.
As I’ve said in previous posts, a game goes on at each of the station sites, and if you go to the 72nd Street Station site right now, you’ll see what happens. Construction fencing goes up, which as you’ve heard from the merchants in the NYT article, reduces customer traffic to their stores. Meanwhile there’s no serious construction for a year or more. Businesses wither. That’s before the “heavy construction” starts. Once the heavy construction happens, another year or two is added in delays. The MTA has developed a perfect formula for driving a business into oblivion.
Merchants and real estate values are suffering deeply, while the MTA fiddles a tune saying “sorry”. I understand there’s a price for progress. The folks on Second Avenue are paying an additional price for the incompetence and greed of the MTA and its contractors.
The mismanagement of this project, which has now put it billions of dollars and years over budget is causing huge and unnecessary economic damage to the lives of the thousands who live along this bleeding and mismanaged artery.
The human toll is large. There are accidents, a few times a week, many unreported, in the construction zone. Pedestrians hit by cars, motorcycles that hit unseen potholes and lose control. Cars that hit one another. I witnessed a food delivery guy hit by a car, and hobbled away, asking not to be helped, because he was an undocumented alien. A cab last week hit a construction sign that was sticking out into the street. The MTA boasts that there are very few injured workers, which is fantastic. The number of times ambulances come for the citizens are not in the MTA reports. They should be.
Second Avenue is like some of the wars we’re fighting. The public keeps being told that “it’s going to be great when it’s over”. One has to ask, is this the best way to run a railroad?
Ben, just because you don’t see work happening doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. A lot of the early work involves relocating utilities that are below the street/sidewalk. Construction crews could be working just below the ground and you would have no way to know if you only walk/drive by on the street.
To reinforce what Avi said, I had other commenters say the same thing about the work between 92nd and 96th Sts. One person in particular continued to claim that nothing was happening at the construction, but then all of a sudden, there was a giant four-block hole, 70 feet deep with a tunnel boring machine in it.
I think you’re overplaying the human toll, and I do have to ask how else you would run a railroad. Building a subway line is very disruptive, and as I said, that’s the price you have to pay for progress. One of the reasons no big projects are finished in New York is precisely because of that attitude.
We’ve had numerous comparisons in this forum and others between the construction of 1.7 miles of Second Avenue Subway vs. tens or hundreds of miles of subway construction in other countries. The project in Beijing was geologically much more difficult than this. Much of it in lose dirt and sand. Dozens of stations are constructed in other projects in the time it takes this one to build three. It’s really shameful. We should not allow for any excuses. The project was delayed for six months while MTA lawyers haggled with a landlord about fixing his building. In the end, the MTA did the right thing, it fixed the building, so the blasting could start in the Launch Box. I dare say that I am very familiar with engineering and with what’s going on with this project.
Avi, the first relocation of utilities was at the Launch Box, and it fell behind immediately and probably ended up a year to 1.5 years behind schedule (include the decking with that). The other station sites utilities are still being relocated. Last I looked the 72nd Street contract to relocate the utilities was still being bid. What’s going on underground right now is the TBM work. There are no vast numbers of people working underground. It would be wonderful if it were so.
Ben, I am in favor of the Second Avenue Subway being built. I am appalled by the manner in which it is being done. At the beginning there was absolutely no serious planning for vehicular and pedestrian control. You can look at earlier posts of mine. There were some serious accidents with people going to hospitals, because pedestrians, vehicular traffic and construction equipment and crews were all sharing the same space without barriers and without traffic control agents. Nothing. It’s only in the last year that Jersey Barriers have been put up to separate some (not all) of the pedestrian crosswalks and only in the last weeks (since the accident toll has increased) that traffic control agents are at most of the construction intersections. Hopefully these measures will reduce the number of accidents.
How else to run the railroad? I’d run it the way construction projects are run in the private sector, the way Yankee Stadium and/or the New Meadowlands got designed and built in about a year. The Central Park Wollman Rink construction languished for years with no end in sight and Donald Trump took it over and finished it in a few months. He said he couldn’t stand looking out his window at a kind of construction twilight zone. I don’t care much for Trump, but it’s a good illustration of the way public projects are run in NYC, and what private folks can push through (at lower cost, because it takes less time). Other cities run projects well. Entire Olympic villages and infrastructure is often built in less than 4 years — with subways included. And we’re spending 8 years, or more for 1.7 miles of subway. You have to hire the best people at MTA who know how to wrestle a project and a contractor from start to finish. There are many reasons things don’t get built in NYC, but why in the world when something does get approved and funded, do we let it become a project management laughing stock?
The best way to finish a project is on schedule and on budget. If the managers at the MTA can’t do it. Find new managers. Ben, as you’ve noted in one of your articles, the MTA hired Accenture to assess the way it does business. The conclusion, it does business badly.
Straphangers, the stores and the people on the street are paying the price — and for every bit of delay and waste on the Second Avenue Subway, the money that the contractors suck out of it, a project somewhere else in NYC will not be built.
Beijing is a shitty, shitty example of subway construction. China may build a lot, but it’s doing it at nearly Western prices despite its low wages.
Here is how the professionals do it. 40 kilometers of tunnel in 3 years, for about 2 billion real dollars.
What if – and I’m just thinking outside the (launch) box here, 2nd Ave were closed to all traffic except buses and off-hour deliveries in the construction zone? Cars could take York or the FDR. You’d be able to dedicate more space to pedestrians, it would be safer, and the aboveground work could probably be done sooner.
The subway tracks themselves are in a tunnel low enough below ground that they’re not disrupting the sidewalk. The sidewalk disruptions happen to construct the stations themselves. And unfortunately those stations are below the sidewalk. So you could close 2nd ave to cars and dedicate a lane to pedestrians, but the barricaded area would still need to be where it is so stations can be built.
I invite those who think it’s not so bad to actually go up to 2nd Ave. where construction is happening. I’m not saying it’s the end of the world, but before you talk at least know what you’re talking about by seeing it first hand. Reading the paper and seeing some numbers like “40% have lost business” doesn’t adequately tell the story.
It’s a question of cost-benefit to me. Is it worth $5B+ and more than a decade of businesses and residents suffering for 3 subway stops? Is the purported boon to the UES really going to be that great? I have doubts.
Over on The Launch Box, a blog that I edit, I’ve been keeping track of the stores that have opened and closed (since the construction started) in and around the TBM launch box work site. (A full listing of the effected store fronts can be found on this link: “Businesses that have closed”.)
There are about 60 store fronts in this area and by my count 22 of them have closed for one reason or another in the past 3 1/2 years. I’m not an expect on commercial real estate, but by this measurement it seems clear that the construction has had a negative impact on many of the businesses in this area.
Ben
So what? It sucks for them, but we’re talking about 22 businesses versus the good of the whole city here.
But, Ben, what happens when you control for the bad economy and the normal turnover rate on Second Ave. I bet you’re only seeing maybe a 25 percent jump in closures due to the subway system. I would have to count in my neighborhood, but based on memory, I can list a handful of businesses over the span of four blocks that have closed within the last few months, let alone 3.5 years.
How hard is it to look at how many stores have closed on 1st Avenue?
What’s needed is some form of business assistance. Since businesses that can stay in business stand to benefit greatly from the completed SAS, there needs to be some form of short-term assistance for the business interruption currently happening which no one can really deny is happening. This assistance can be in the form of extremely low interest loans that need not start being re-paid until SAS completion, or just some straight supplemental aid during construction. I favor the first approach by far because it seems the more even-handed of the 2. Remember that these are all small businesses. They are not the Gaps and Targets and Olive Gardens of the world with corporate resources behind them.
Creating a Shop 2nd Ave is a gimmick that actually backfires by calling more attention to the fact that going there puts you in the middle of an undesirable work zone.
You’d probably have to go back and do a search to see what the normal business turnover rate was for Second Avenue stores pre-construction versus the current situation to get an accurate account on how much of the turnover is due to the project and how much might be due simply to the normal business cycle, or even go back to the 1970s and check city records see what the turnover was when the original three segments were being built (including the 2nd-9th street one that was later filled in) to compare the effect on stores along the avenue then versus now.
I lived on Connecticut Avenue in Washington 30 years ago when the Red Line was being built, and stores in the area where the stations were being placed suffered huge disruptions (even a strip store area at Cleveland Park had difficulty, since it had it’s own off-street parking area but the station work made even trying to turn into the parking area an ordeal). The same thing was true over at Tenley Circle and up at the district line on Wisconsin Avenue in the 1979-81 period — businesses directly at the station entrances were tremendously inconvenienced by the construction, while those 1-2 blocks away got off relatively unscathed.
If NYC and/or NYS isn’t offering some sort of property/business tax exemptions to affected stores along Second Avenue right now as a way to help them deal with the construction-related customer losses, they should be, even if they have to designate specific blocks right around the station entrances as the only areas that qualify for the tax breaks.
Unfortunately, the economy tanked just as construction started, so the prior business turnover rate can’t accurately be used to tell what effect the SAS construction had on store closings.
Agreed. One can easily look at stretches of 2nd ave. that are between construction areas and are unaffected. This can control for the current economic climate and other associated variation by neighborhood.
While I agree with alot of what Ben says, I’m familiar with the area and alot of these businesses were obviously in trouble before construction. We need to compare the situation with Second Avenue with the situation in the rest of the city. Small businesses seem to be on the knife edge throughout the city.
I’m also curious if the landlords have adjusted the commercial rents on Second Avenue at all in view of construction, except upward.
The point isn’t to criticize the likes of Mrs. Yoo who chose a spot a few months before ground-breaking. The point is that she was probably told that the project would be done in 2012 at the time. And now it’s probably 2018, according to the FTA. Asking a community to withstand more than A DECADE of disruption is unconscionable. The businesses in the area should be compensated for the MTA’s pure and utter incompetence and mismanagement. Furthermore, I see a few subway work zones sitting nearly empty in the east 80s for weeks. One of these empty zones is sitting right in front of a restaurant that just closed, ostensibly due to the construction. If this work space isn’t needed, take down the barriers and fences and spare these businesses and pedestrians the disruption. THAT would be government working with the business owners.
One point being missed is that ALL of Second Avenue is in a DEPRESSION. Not just the areas being worked on right now.
Take a walk down 2nd Avenue from the 40s to 14th street and you’ll see so many empty/vacant stores your head will spin.
New York City is about to enter a Commercial RE DEPRESSION, the likes of which have not been seen since 1932.
Who speaks for those of us that are long-term residents that have had no peace and quiet near the launch box (or other aspects of the construction)? Yes, I hear you all loud and clear “greater good for the greatest number”. A SUBSTANTIAL part of those being benefitted include the people that are enjoying their peaceful York avenue apartments with river views. Wonder if they would consider trading their apartments to come live along the construction site (and perhaps pitch in to do some work?)
Who speaks for the kids in critical years of High School, not being able to get the quiet needed to focus on their studies until the workmen are gone – usually way past the 10pm ‘extended work window’.
What of those requiring handicapped access to sidewalks to alight from the Dial-A-Ride ambulettes, but have no access for a whole block long, and have to make their way around cracked, cramped and uneven sidewalks?
And then who speaks of the unruly, rude, and abusive subway workers – who park their CARS (wait, aren’t they supposed to be working on relieving the congestion… no, it doesn’t apply to MTA workers or their hired contractors perhaps?) illegally along side streets, or even within the launch box; who make catcalls at the neighborhood women passing by; who relax with cigars (hey they have gauranteed employment until the subway is done, so why not, eh?) after their shift with the a/c blasting out from the open doorways of their ‘site offices’.
Well public accountability in the style of Alan Hevesi will be good for the MTA. As was mentioned in the earlier posts the track record of delivery is extremely poor. I recall the response to a question raised at a CB8 meeting on the confidence level of their estimates of delivering in 2014. “We have chosen contractors that have done this sort of project many times, and together with them, we know what we are doing and the plans account for contingencies.”
At the moment, if they were working for me, I’d fire them. Wait a minute, aren’t they working for us?